FAQ/Guidelines and "About" pages

Community Building
1

I’m a bit confused that FAQ in the sidebar links to what is actually a “House rules” page (now Guidelines) – seems this is not new Why is Guidelines called FAQ? Can we link to GUIDELINES and FAQ from hamburger menu?

We actually have a FAQ in my community, which is a whole category, with frequently asked questions about our subject matter. We also have House Rules. The “About” page is a little bare – it’s nice to have it display the staff, but there’s a lot more I’d like to say on a proper About page.

And then there is the issue that /guidelines looks great in English but in French we would want a different URL. Same with /about => /a-propos which is more standard.

So here is what I’m wondering: what added value do these built-in pages bring? Does Discourse “do stuff” with them? Can I just ignore/delete them and create my own “house rules” and “about” topics (but then, it’s sad, they won’t be able to live at pretty URLs, but I guess I can live with that).

How have you done things in your community? How did you juggle providing information about your community, FAQ for your subject matter, forum guidelines or house rules? Did you use the built-in pages or make your own? Did you modify or adapt the existing pages to serve your purpose?

Review and update topics related to FAQ & Guidelines links
2

5 posts were split to a new topic: Review and update topics related to FAQ & Guidelines links

3

This might be an easy one, if you just missed it – your About page should have an “Edit this page” link at the top pointing to /admin/config/about, where you can add a summary and full description.

Understanding and customizing the About page - Documentation / Site Management

4

The main “stuff” I see is that by default we get a link to About, FAQ and/or Guidelines in the sidebar menu, and the FAQ/Guidelines, TOS, and Privacy links built into the About page.

You probably could ignore them, and customize the sidebar. My concern would be that if there’s a path anywhere to navigate to /about (or if search engines are smart enough to look for it? :thinking:) it could get crawled and indexed. And so might the links on About leading to unused FAQ/TOS/Privacy pages, whether the links are hidden with CSS display:none or not.
:warning: Disclaimer: I’m no SEO expert!

5

In addition to what ToddZ said:

Not everyone does a thorough job setting up their Discourse instance. These pages are there probably because they provide a pretty good boiler plate (starting point) and are clearly better than nothing when first getting started